The Case of the Dummy MRP Order

How loss of ownership keeps impacting the business

Context

Central Indiana manufacturer. Raw materials have a 30-day shelf life. When a customer hasn't committed to a final quantity yet, the customer service manager enters a placeholder "dummy" order in the MRP system to hold the slot.

What keeps happening

When the CSM is out, someone else steps in and enters a second order — not knowing the dummy already exists. Both orders get processed. Material gets ordered against phantom demand. The 30-day clock starts ticking on inventory that was never really needed.

The downstream cost

Expiring material. High-salary meetings to figure out what to do with it. Production schedules shuffled to burn it into lower-value products before it goes bad. All hands, all quarters, same fire.

What the company has tried

Retrained the team three times. Framed it as a people issue — someone's not following the process. But the fire keeps coming back, and by now no one owns it.

How I'd approach it

Interview the stakeholders — CSM, backup coverage, production planning, purchasing. Map the process as it actually runs, not as the SOP describes it. The duplicate order isn't the failure — it's the symptom. The failure is that the MRP system has no way to flag "we already have a placeholder for this customer in the last X days."

Then work with IT to build that flag. Not more training. A system that makes the mistake harder to make.

Why it matters

This is the pattern: when a recurring cost gets framed as a people issue, the fix is always more training. When it gets framed as a process issue, the fix is durable. One of those keeps the meeting on the calendar. The other takes it off.